I’m really excited to announce the next Spaz Hackathon, taking place at the PHP Community Conference in Nashville, TN on April 21 from 5:30p-10:00p EDT (tenatively). It will be part of a larger social tech hackathon sponsored by Tropo. Food and drink (non-alcoholic) will be provided. We will have awesome swag provided by the HP webOS dev relations team and Appcelerator, and we’ll be giving away 2 unlocked GSM Pre 2 smartphones to the top two Spaz contributions. It’s super exciting.

As this is a hackathon, the focus will be on code contributions. We have five different projects you can contribute to:

SpazCore – JavaScript, HTML, CSS
Our base set of JavaScript libraries. These power Spaz and other apps (like the Joind.in webOS app).

Spaz Desktop – JavaScript, HTML, CSS
A cross-platform, awesomely expandable and customizable desktop microblogging client. Originally built on Adobe AIR, with current development focused on Appcelerator Titanium Desktop.

Spaz Web APIs – PHP 5.3
RESTful web APIs used by the Spaz clients, built on top of FRAPI. All PHP 5.3-based, ready for easy hacking.

Documentation and end-user support
Less nerdy, but just as important. We keep a knowledge base of data available at help.getspaz.com. We also need people who can volunteer a small amount of time per week to answer user questions.

Note that all the info is at http://j.mp/helpspaz, including links to all of our repos on GitHub and ticket tracking on Lighthouse. If you’re not already boned-up on Git, do so now – we’ll only accept code submissions via pull requests.

If you’re planning on attending, I strongly suggest you sign up for the Spaz-dev mailing list and tell us you’re attending: we want to make sure we have enough stuff for everybody.

If you can’t make it to the conference, we will be on IRC during the hackathon, so people are absolutely welcome to participate that way. We hang out on Freenode in #spaz. Swag and prizes will only be available to in-person attendees, though.

We’re very excited about this latest Spaz Hackathon, and we hope you are too. I’m happy to talk to you about ideas you have on IRC, Identi.ca, Twitter, or email. Hope to see you there!